03/07/2022
A globe-trotting memoir of tech innovation and philanthropic zeal, Strong Connections encourages the next generation of activist entrepreneurs to close the digital divide for marginalized women around the world. Wang’s absorbing debut also offers an exemplary model for midlife reinvention while functioning as a guide for pivoting with purpose. After a career in investment banking, Wang became an “accidental technologist,” with a mission to use digital tools to help women in extreme poverty establish financial independence. Her undertaking acknowledges systemic inequities (including in education and marital autonomy) while providing these women the fundamentals of self-determination, starting with helping them to establish their own bank accounts.
Strong Connections unfolds as Wang’s journey of discovery, from the “light-bulb moment” in a game preserve when a Maasai man pulled a cell phone from his traditional clothing, to becoming the global director of digital financial services for Opportunity International, a Christian ecumenical nonprofit. She details trips to Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania, as well as several rural states in India, during a period when mobile phone usage had reached even far off-the-grid rural communities. How could global connectivity be tapped to help women living with both economic hardship and gender discrimination? Wang’s brand of advocacy is clear-eyed and action-oriented, chipping away at entrenched, exclusionary systems with financial solutions that address both individual needs and the greater good.
Tech and business readers will gain insights into client-based principles of problem-solving, and readers looking for a meaningful career change will find inspiration in Wang’s challenging and rewarding shift to microfinance. Her descriptions of growing up in Meridian, Mississippi, as the child of Taiwanese immigrants could be the basis of an intriguing follow-up memoir, which could further illuminate Wang’s paradoxical sensibility, equal parts tough resolve and active kindness. Strong Connections adds the warmth of humanity to the cold calculations of technology, and champions the intrinsic value of women helping other women with equanimity, compassion and respect.
Takeaway: Both an inspiring personal journey and history of financial innovation and bolstering the autonomy of women around the world.
Great for fans of: Mary Ellen Iskenderian’s There’s Nothing Micro About a Billion Women, Alana Karen’s The Adventures of Women in Tech, and Malene Rix’s Negotiating with Yourself.
Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A- Marketing copy: B
2022-02-23
Debut author and technology strategist Wang recounts her efforts to bring the mobile phone, and the opportunities it promises, to people in the least wealthy parts of the world.
In 2002, the author was traveling though the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. She was surprised to find strong mobile-phone network connectivity there, and she realized that her “assumptions about the digital revolution would need to be overhauled.” She left the world of investment banking and devoted herself to bringing mobile phones to some of the most remote and poverty-stricken communities in the hinterlands of Africa and South Asia. She discovered that the ownership of a mobile phone, which people in so much of the world take for granted, could be transformative for those living on the margins; it provided not only connectedness to family and friends, but also access to information, as well as health and financial services. Further, it specifically provided additional security to women, a lesson that Wang says was driven home most emphatically by what she calls “disproportionate burdens on women” caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The author thoughtfully chronicles her indefatigable efforts, which included working with Ashoka, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs seeking to address “some of the world’s biggest problems, like literacy, environmental issues, and maternal health,” as well as her work with global microfinance network Opportunity International. The resulting experience was one of what she terms exhauluration, a combination of exhilaration and exhaustion. Also, she astutely notes a cheerful aspect of technology: the manner in which it encourages communication and unity: “It bridges our humanity across miles of distance, culture, and economic circumstance.” Overall, Wang’s memoir is both informative and affecting, and it furnishes striking portraits of women she found “on the wrong side of the digital divide.”
An edifying account of the potential of technology to address global problems.
